Relentless Visionary: Alessandro Volta

by Michael Berick

Overview

If asked to list important inventors, few remember to include Alessandro Volta. Yet, his is a household name more spoken than that of Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers, or even Thomas Edison. That's because the terms "volt" and "voltage" can be attributed to Volta, the inventor of the "Voltaic pile," which is recognized as the first electric battery.

A product of the Age of Enlightenment--a time when ideas about reason, science, literature and liberty took center stage--Volta employed a very modern, hands-on approach to his work. Though he had no formal education, he was the first person to identify the gas known as methane, and created the first authoritative list of conducting metals.

Alessandro Volta saw things not just as they were, but as what they could be. He was a disrupter, an innovator and a visionary. Above all, he was relentless. Without Volta's hunger to create and his drive to invent and discover, we might not have electric cars, laptops, cellphones, and hearing aids today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947431300
Publisher:	Barbera Foundation Inc
Publication date:	02/01/2020
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.46(d)

Editorial Reviews

2020-07-30
A biography focuses on an often neglected but historically significant Italian scientist.

When Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was born in 1745, no one foresaw monumental intellectual achievements in his future—he didn’t start talking until he was 4 years old, and his family considered the possibility that he was “dim-witted.” But, as Berick’s concise book shows, he eventually became an “avid, intense learner” and developed an interest in science, philosophy, and poetry. At the age of 18, he boldly corresponded with Giovanni Beccaria, a well-known Italian physicist and “acolyte” of Benjamin Franklin, and Jean-Antoine Nollet, a prominent French scientist, marking the beginning of Volta’s promising career. When Volta was about 30—in 1775—he invented an electrophorus, an early version of an electrical induction device, his first big breakthrough. His groundbreaking research thereafter would have a significant impact on electrical science as well as on the still fledgling field of meteorology. Furthermore, Volta’s early version of an electric battery “spawned an explosion of new inventions almost immediately, and has continued to play an essential part of modern life.” At the height of his professional career, he cultivated a “unique patronage relationship” with Napoleon, who not only provided him with material support, but also got him elected to the prestigious French Institute. This book is part of the Mentoris Project, which focuses on eminent Italians and Italian Americans. Berick, with painstaking meticulousness, chronicles Volta’s indelible scientific legacy, charting both his triumphs and challenges. Volta emerges as an intriguing figure—on the one hand, a “disrupter, an innovator and a visionary,” but on the other, a very cautious man, less a rebel than a “moderate with a rebellious streak,” someone who preferred to keep his unconventional views about religion and politics private. The author’s account can be dry and technical, but for those interested in the unfolding of the Enlightenment and the role of Italian science, this is an informative and absorbing resource.

A thorough and engrossing account of a scientific pioneer and the age that produced him.

Kirkus Reviews